Modern amd Postmodern Poetry

The emphasis in the Romantic poetry was on the poet, but during the Modern era the emphasis is more on the poem itself. T. S.Eliot (1889-1965) says, “We can only say that a poem, in some sense, has its own life; that its parts form something quite different from a body of neatly ordered biographical data; that the feeling, or emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet” (The Sacred Wood). After the Second World War, Walt Whitman’s impassioned celebration of the individual (Song of Myself) was not enough. During 1950s, the Beat poets, the San Francisco poets, the Black Mountain poets and the New York School of  poets gave a new direction to poetry. The slogan of the New York school of poets was: “Try to be the work yourself”. The Black Mountain poets were so called, because they lived and wrote together at Black Mountain college in North Carolina. For the Black Mountain artists like Franz Kline, William de Kooning, John Cage, Charles Olson, and several others, ’stripped-down poems’ were more important than violent self-pity.

The postmodern poems are written in an “anti-rules” fashion, a revolutionary characteristic asserting “we can never really know anything” (Rosenau). These poems provide quite a new start to poetry, quite different from the decadent English authors writing during 1890s. W. B. Yeats aptly says: ” The ‘Nineties’ tried your game And died, there’s nothing in it” (Collected Poems, 1950). T. S. Eliot also criticized ‘the annual scourge of the Georgian anthology’. My point is that the poets writing in the 21st century cannot and should not write poems which are conformist and complacent